A day in the lives of women living on the brink of poverty
commissioned for The Shriver Report‘s
latest project, “A
Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink,” as shown
through the lenses a team of award-winning photographers
including former White House photographer Barbara Kinney, Melissa
Lyttle, Barbara Ries, Jan Sonnenmair, Callie Shell, Melissa
Farlow and Ami Vitale.

Celebrating the centennial of legendary designer Ray Eames, this all-new exhibition is the first to explore the early life and work of the Sacramento native who broke barriers during an era of limited opportunities for women in the arts. Although the work of Eames Office is well-known for innovations in modern architecture, furniture, films, toys, photography, textiles, exhibition design and more, Ray Eames often remains often overlooked or mistaken for the brother of her husband and business partner, Charles, in history.

Co-created in partnership with Eames Office, the exhibit features new information on Ray’s early life in Sacramento and work produced prior to meeting Charles in 1941, as based upon research conducted by Carla Hartman, Education Director of Eames Office, which played a central role in the project’s development. In addition, the exhibit also chronicles well-known Eames Office projects produced by Ray and Charles from 1941-1988, providing new insight on Ray’s ground-breaking role as the equal partner of Charles.

Including over 100 original works and rarely-seen artifacts from Eames Office and the Eames family’s collections, the exhibit provides a new perspective on Ray’s 60-year career in the arts, along with her significance in history as one of the 20th century’s most influential – yet largely unknown – artists, whose influence continues to shape design today.

A journey through life, love and death, “Day of the Dead:
Art of Día de los Muertos” is an all-new exhibit featuring
contemporary installations by California artists Rob-O, John Huerta and David Lozeau.

Opening on September 24, 2013 for Hispanic Heritage Month, the
exhibit highlights the Mexican cultural tradition of honoring
deceased loved ones each year on November 1 and 2 by creating
calaveras de azúcar (sugar skulls), altares de
muertos (altars of the dead) and ofrendas
(offerings), which has evolved from the Aztecs to modern day
California.

Members of the public are invited to celebrate their friends,
family and ancestors by participating in an adjacent
Community
Altar and leaving a photograph or small remembrance
through January 5, 2014.

Sponsored by California Latino Legislative Caucus and
Mayahuel Restaurant & Tequila Museum. Developed in
association with John Huerta Arte, David Lozeau, Sacramento Arts
& Business Council and Sugar Skull Art.

“Eames Generations: A Legacy of California Design” is a new
exhibit featuring artwork by Lucia Eames and Llisa Demetrios,
daughter and granddaughter of legendary California designers
Charles and Ray Eames whose legacy of innovation continues to
influence the arts today.

Lucia Eames has designed indoor and outdoor furniture and
metalworks for over thirty years. A graduate of Radcliffe
College, where she studied sculpture, Lucia designs functional
indoor and outdoor pieces laser-cut in carbon steel, aluminum,
and stainless steel. Her commissioned public works include the
92-foot-tall Wind Harp in South San Francisco and the
kinetic Clock Tower in Newport Beach. As the matriarch
of the Eames family, Lucia also oversees the preservation of the
Eames family’s legacy with her five children, who together serve
as the Eames Foundation’s Board of Directors.

Llisa Demetrios works primarily with bronze, creating large-scale
sculptures often displayed in outdoor settings. A graduate of
Yale University, Llisa also studied at the California College of
Arts and Crafts and has lectured on sculpture at the Academy of
Art University. Formerly the archivist of the Mies van der Rohe
collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, today Llisa
is the archivist of the Eames Foundation and shares studio space
with her mother in Sonoma County.

Working in a style she calls “Perceptionist Art,” Sabrina Abbott
creates bold, vibrant canvases focusing on everyday objects that
range from flowers to trash.

The young artist developed her unique style while studying in
Italy at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and continued honing her
skills while working as an intern at the Uffizi museum in
Florence and at the Louvre in Paris.

The exhibit is the first museum retrospective of Abbott’s work
and continues through May 26, 2013, only at The California
Museum.

Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters In America reveals the
history of a small group of independent American women who helped
shape the nation’s social and cultural landscape. Over the last
300 years, the sisters built and managed schools, hospitals,
orphanages and other social institutions that have endured during
eras when most women had few — if any — professional
opportunities.

As inspirational trailblazers, they corresponded with President
Thomas Jefferson, talked down bandits and roughnecks in the Wild
West and provided the first form of health insurance to
Midwestern loggers. As an overlooked part of history, they played
instrumental roles in significant American turning points — from
the Civil War, Gold Rush and San Francisco Earthquake to the
Depression, Civil Rights Movement and Hurricane Katrina.

An adjoining installation features the history of a group of
California sisters who came to San Francisco in 1851 and became
pioneers in quality, affordable child care in 1878, long before
its existence today.

To learn more, visit the national touring exhibition web site
WomenandSpirit.org. Sponsored by the Leadership Conference of
Women Religious in association with Cincinnati Museum Center.

From the earliest 1950s wood plank and metal roller skate wheel
prototypes to the modern engineered marvels of today, rare boards
and ephemera document the evolution of “sidewalk surfing.”
Highlights include many of the sports’ firsts, including the
first pro model skateboard, the first board with urethane wheels
and the first Zephyr board. Over 200 unique items, many from The
Sidewalk Shop, Skatelab and Z-BOY® Archive collections, are on
display including Tony Hawk’s autographed personal board, an
extremely rare Willie Mays board and gear from over 30 California
pros.

Multimedia presentations featuring the revolutionary riders,
artists and manufacturers reveal how riding concrete evolved from
a subculture of teenage defiance to an iconic worldwide cultural
phenomenon.

Celebrating the class of 2010 California Hall of Fame, this
year’s exhibition is over 3,000-square feet and includes more
than 100 unique items, many of which have never been publicly
displayed such as:

The recreated office of Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown
containing desk, chair, lamp, blotter and a marlin caught
by the former California governor

Props used in the block-buster films of James Cameron,
including maquettes and spears from Avatar, life-size Terminator
statue, machine from Aliens, ship’s wheel and engine wheel from
Titanic and more

The restored 1933 Lincoln automobile owned by Bank of America
founder and father of modern banking, A.P. Giannini

Several costumes worn by music and film icon Barbra Streisand
in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, My Name Is Barbra and
Yentl; her first contract with the Bon Soir; albums, tickets,
movie posters and rare Broadway billboard from Funny Girl

Wayne Thiebaud gallery personally containing works selected
by the artist himself

The pilot script from Golden Girls signed by the original
cast and an Emmy® won by comedienne Betty White

In recognition of Hispanic Heritage Month, Mas Chisme de la
Cultura/Spinning Cultural Stories features the original artwork
of the Sacramento-based Chicana collective Co-Madres Artistas.

The artists – Irma Barbosa, Carmel Castillo, Mareia de Socorro,
Laura Llano and Helen Villa – have been leaders in the Chicana
art movement for the past twenty years. Over 20 of their bright
and engaging paintings speaking to themes of Latina pride,
feminism and community activism will be exhibited in the Maria
Shriver Gallery through Sunday, November 13, 2011.

Join us for the special Second Saturday opening reception on
September 10th from 5:00-7:00PM!

Learn more about this event

Download event flyer

R.S.V.P. by 4:00PM on Friday, September 9, 2011

“Pot Painter,” by Mareia de Sorocco; “Betrothed,” by Helen Villa;
“The Arrival of the Farewell,” by Irma Barbosa. Images courtesy
of Co-Madres Artistas.

Get On Board: Stories of the Los Angeles to Houston Freedom Ride
recounts the seldom-heard story of CORE’s (Congress of Racial
Equality) freedom ride from Los Angeles, California, to Houston,
Texas, in August of 1961. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of
the freedom rides, this exhibit underscores the ambitious
optimism that inspired 11 Californians — both black and white,
men and women — to leave their schools, families and homes to
get on board a train for a ride to secure freedom and liberty for
all Americans during the Civil Rights Movement.

Inspired by Houston’s Union Station, the exhibit features a
U-shaped lunch counter with six counter stools that serves as a
display area for artifacts that relate the courageous stories of
the California Freedom Riders such as:

Founded in 2004 by then-California First Lady Maria Shriver, the
Minerva Awards honor women who have changed our world with their
courage, their strength, and their wisdom. The annual awards
celebrated women who work to make this world a more
compassionate, tolerant and just place. This conference-funded
exhibit chronicles their lasting legacies.

The 2009 Minerva Award winners are:

Agnes Stevens: The life of retired schoolteacher Agnes Stevens
changed in 1993 when she read a book about homelessness in the
United States. The staggering number of homeless children
and the shockingly few who went to school appalled her. She began
teaching homeless kids in a park in Santa Monica, encouraging
them to stay in school, keep up their grades and participate in
school activities.

From that individual decision to help– to bring 30 years of
classroom experience to America’s most forgotten children–School
on Wheels was born.

Seventeen years later, Stevens and School on Wheels provide
one-on-one tutoring for homeless kids who live in shelters,
motels, group foster homes, cars and on the streets. More than
1,000 volunteer tutors from every profession and background help
thousands of homeless children ages six to 18, throughout
Southern California enroll in school and stay there.

Formerly a teacher in the New York Bowery, Chicago’s Chinatown
and Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, Stevens now scours the seedier
parts of Southern California looking for children. The neediest
don’t come to her, she says. She has to go to them.

Without government support of any kind, School on Wheels also
gives away at least 5000 backpacks loaded with school supplies,
and some school uniforms. The children get help enrolling
in school and with locating and filing school records as well as
a toll-free phone number for around-the-clock School on Wheels’
support. When a child moves, School on Wheels follows them,
offering stability in an otherwise unstable existence.

At many shelters, School on Wheels has created special learning
rooms, with computers, books, drawing and writing materials, to
give the children a quiet place to study.

Her 20 year fight on behalf of homeless children was recognized
in 2008, when Stevens was one of three women who received the
World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child, known as
the children’s “Nobel Prize.”

Helen Waukazoo: Growing up in New Mexico, Helen Devore Waukazoo
remembers her beloved Navajo father telling her she would “walk
in two worlds:” that of the Native American and the white
American.

At 13, Helen and two of her siblings were torn from their family
and forced to attend boarding school in a government attempt to
move and integrate American Indians from their reservations into
non-Indian communities. Helen’s school was in Utah, a thousand
miles and a world apart from any life she had known. Separated
from her parents, she was forced into a foreign world in which
she was forbidden to honor her own culture and language. It was a
traumatic experience and the moment she was free to leave, she
did.

She headed to San Francisco in her early 20’s and volunteered at
a drop-in center started by a church group, a place for American
Indian people to connect in the midst of what often felt like a
foreign world. The group recognized the high rate of addiction
Helen’s people struggled with—both to alcohol and drugs. As she
rose from volunteer clerk-typist to paid bookkeeper to co-Founder
of the American Indian Friendship House in the 1970s, the mission
for the center changed as well.

Today Friendship House exists to help keep Helen’s native people
sober. Many who come to her are often not just addicted, but
homeless and unemployed. Through a unique program approach, most
leave committed to sobriety and in a position to regain their
footing and their dignity. Friendship House’s relapse rate is
half that of the average treatment center. Part of the reason is
the program’s unique blend of 12 Step, Western psychology and
Native American traditions. What Helen realized was that Native
Americans are more prone to addiction when they abandon
tradition. At Friendship House, recovery includes prayers,
medicine men, healing ceremonies, talking circles and a sweat
lodge. She has also started a 10-bed facility for mothers whose
children have been removed by the courts. Here they are taught
not just parenting skills, but how to cook and nurture their
children incorporating many Indian traditions.

The staff of Friendship House provides Indian Health services in
neighboring Alameda and Santa Clara counties. Friendship
House has grown into an 80-bed facility in a brand new building
and serves as a regional treatment center, the largest center for
Indian Americans in California. Beyond its successful
alcohol and addiction treatment programs and its facility to
reunite mothers and children, Friendship House today helps in
finding jobs for clients and in providing youth services.

Dr. Jane Goodall: In the summer of 1960, 26-year-old Goodall
arrived at Lake Tanganyika, East Africa to study chimpanzees, an
act so unorthodox at the time that British authorities required
her mother accompany her as a companion. But before long, she
struck out on her own to become a world leader and new voice in
redefining the relationship between humans and animals.

In 1957, a school friend invited Goodall to her parents’ farm in
Kenya. Within months, she met anthropologist and
paleontologist Dr. Louis Leakey, who had been searching for
someone to begin a study of chimpanzees.

At first, the chimps fled whenever they saw Goodall, but
gradually the chimps allowed her close enough for her to get to
know them individually and observe their everyday behavior. In
the fall of 1960, she saw a chimpanzee strip leaves off twigs to
fashion tools. Until then, scientists thought humans were the
only species to make and use tools. This would be one of
Goodall’s most important, although by no means only, discovery.

In her almost 50 years as a primatologist and more recently as an
environmentalist, she has fought poachers, polluters and
politicians. She has radically influenced her field of study and
blazed a trail for other women who have followed in her
footsteps, including Dian Fossey. Her research and writing have
revolutionized scientific thinking about the evolution of humans.

The Gombe Stream Research Centre, which Dr. Goodall established
in 1965, has become a training ground for students interested in
studying primates. In 1977, Dr. Goodall, established the Jane
Goodall Institute. The Institute supports the continuing research
at Gombe and is a global leader in protecting chimpanzees and
their habitats and for establishing conservation programs in
Africa.

Roots & Shoots, Goodall’s global environmental and
humanitarian youth program, has nearly 150,000 members in 110
countries. In 2002, Secretary General Kofi Annan named Dr.
Goodall a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2004 she became a
Dame of the British Empire, the female equivalent of a
knighthood. Dr. Goodall received her Ph.D. from Cambridge
University in 1965, and she has been the recipient of numerous
scientific and humanitarian awards from around the world.

Dr. Kathy Hull: Kathy Hull founded the George Mark Children’s
House in San Leandro, CA, the first freestanding residential
pediatric palliative care center in the United States, because
she believes that all dying children and their families deserve a
sanctuary as they endure one of life’s most excruciating
experiences. While the vision for this 15,000 square-foot San
Leandro “home” was born from personal family tragedy, every
detail of its execution reflects a sense of love, warmth and
support Hull wants people to know as they struggle with the loss
of their own young life or that of their child’s.

With Dr. Barbara Beach, a pediatric oncologist, Hull started the
house in 2004, acutely aware of the devastation a family faces
from the loss of a child. The house is named for two of her
brothers, George and Mark. In both cases, she remembers how
ill-equipped her family was, as when George was critically ill to
navigate the medical system during crisis.

Before Hull created George Mark Children’s House, the only
options in the United States for dying children were a hospital
room, the family’s home, or nursing homes geared for adults –
all settings that in different ways can be daunting to the
surviving family, and most particularly to dying children
themselves.

Hull, a clinical psychologist, and her colleague Dr. Beach saw
firsthand how badly families needed an alternative: a supportive
environment in which every family member’s medical, emotional and
spiritual needs could be met as they faced this toughest of
life’s trials.

Hull’s first decision was to take on “the look” of her facility.
She engaged an architect to design a beautiful ranch style house
surrounded by a 5 acre oasis of lush trees and flower beds. A
small chapel sits on the top of a hill where services are held in
honor of the children who have died here. The bedrooms have
brightly colored murals. There is a spacious playroom, a computer
game room, family suites, eight patient rooms and a large open
kitchen called Ruth’s Café where family and staff eat together.
In the George Mark Room, families can stay with their child after
her/his death and say goodbye over a period of days if that is
their choice. Counseling to help cope with a loss of a child is
provided free for as long as a family needs it.

Children who come to George Mark have progressive, incurable
diseases that will likely take their lives before they become
adults. Each year, over 200 families call George Mark their
temporary home. Some families come for respite care, a break from
the rigors of caring for their seriously ill child. But hospice
care takes precedence. No child is denied care because their
family is unable to pay.

For more information on past and present winners, visit the
Women’s Conference on the web.

The Minerva Awards exhibit is generously sponsored by the Women’s
Conference and Lifetime Networks.

Counterculture, with its rejection of the ordinary, has long been
synonymous with California. During the Summer of Love in 1967,
San Francisco established itself as the epicenter of the
movement, where new genres of music and art emphasizing
experimentation gained worldwide notoriety. A new exhibit at The
California Museum showcasing 80 rare pieces promoting shows from
Sacramento to Bakersfield explores the Central Valley’s
previously overlooked role as it defines the region’s relevance
in the era’s iconic rock scene.

The Central Valley Turns On: Psychedelic Poster Art,
1965-1975 explores an art form as revolutionary and
experimental as the music it was designed to sell, and highlights
noteworthy performances from many of the era’s legends. Bold
colors and hand-drawn illustrations announce a performance by The
Doors and KZAP’s fifth birthday celebration with the Beach Boys
at Sacramento’s Memorial Auditorium. Dynamic compositions with
intertwining words and imagery decorate handbills to promote The
Jimi Hendrix Experience at Sacramento State College and Creedence
Clearwater Revival at Cal Expo. Compacted designs of nearly
illegible text create patterns to plug the Grateful Dead at
Fresno’s Selland Arena as well as Pink Floyd headlining a
Sacramento Sound Factory show.

Featuring an extraordinary collection of screen and lithographic
prints owned by a private poster art aficionado, the exhibit
presented by The California Museum in partnership with Alisa
Leslie, Curator and Art Historian at Seligman Western
Enterprises, and Walter Medeiros, counterculture art historian
and contributing author of High Art: A History of the Psychedelic
Poster. Many of the pieces have been out of view since they were
created over 40 years ago. Now reintroduced to the public, they
shed new historical perspective on the Central Valley’s
supporting role in California’s counterculture scene and define
the region‘s relevance in the iconic psychedelic rock movement of
the era.

Photographs from the state Capitol by acclaimed former Los
Angeles Times photojournalist Robert Durell offer a vivid and
insightful view of the rollercoaster ride of California politics.
Two dozen photos are on display, along with a larger-than-life
slide show of many more, accompanied by the photographer’s witty
and incisive commentary that gives visitors the back-story behind
each image.